Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:43:36.277Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

10 - Kicking Bodies and Damning Souls: The Danger of Harming “Innocent” Individuals While Punishing “Delinquent” States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Toni Erskine
Affiliation:
University of Aberystwyth
Tracy Isaacs
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
Richard Vernon
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario
Get access

Summary

The problem with trying to punish an institution that is judged to be “delinquent” – whether a “rogue state,” the United Nations (UN), Shell Oil, or the U.S. Army – might be understood as one of responding to an entity that (to invoke Edward, First Baron Thurlow's eighteenth-century account of the corporation) “has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked.” Perhaps this seems a fairly obvious point. After all, even if one can draw some carefully qualified analogies between individual human actors and institutions (as I attempt to do in the first part of this chapter), the two types of entity are different in important ways. One might thereby conclude that the corporeal – and, depending on one's beliefs, even the spiritual – nature of individual human actors renders them vulnerable to forms of punitive harm to which institutions, in the sense of formal organizations, are simply impervious. Alternatively, one might maintain that such an observation has little relevance when we are talking about “delinquent” institutions in international relations. We do not, one might argue, need to be able to anthropomorphize formal organizations to be able to punish them. Indeed, we frequently justify actions toward states, multinational corporations, and intergovernmental organizations in terms of punishment, and these actions often serve successful deterrent, retributive, and even rehabilitative functions.

In this chapter, I want to take a path somewhere between these two responses to the idea of punishing institutions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Erskine, , “Assigning Responsibilities to Institutional Moral Agents: The Case of States and ‘Quasi-States,’Ethics & International Affairs 15, no. 2 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations, ed. Erskine, T. (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 19–40CrossRef
Erskine, , “‘Blood on the UN's Hands’? Assigning Duties and Apportioning Blame to an Intergovernmental Organisation,” Global Society 18, no. 1 (2004), 21–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erskine, , “Locating Responsibility: The Problem of Moral Agency in International Relations,” The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, ed. Reus-Smit, Christian and Snidal, Duncan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 699–707Google Scholar
Dobson, Lynn, “Plural Views, Common Purpose: On How to Address Moral Failure by International Political Organisations,” Journal of International Political Theory 4, no. 1 (April 2008), 34–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adelman, Howard, “Blaming the United Nations,” Journal of International Political Theory 4, no. 1 (April 2008), 9–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahan, , “Innocence, Self-Defense and Killing in War,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 2 (1994), 193–221 (p. 193)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kenny, Anthony, The Logic of Deterrence (London: Firethorn Press, 1985), p. 10Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×